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In 2008, in the city of Belleville in southern Illinois, the
city council passed an ordinance that set the age limit for
trick-or-treaters at 12 years old and under. The law is still on
the list of active Belleville city ordinances – but no one pays
much attention to it.
Under the ordinance, trick or treating by anyone 13 years of age
or older is considered “Halloween solicitation.” Theoretically,
violators can be fined up to $1,000 if they are found guilty of
being too old to trick or treat. But no one has ever been cited.
A woman who answered the phone at Belleville City Hall said
Belleville loves Halloween.
“We don’t go around carding 13 year olds,” she said.
In Virginia and Maryland, a number of localities have ordinances
with trick-or-treating age limits, but the local police are not
out on Halloween trying to find violators.
In 1970, Chesapeake, Virginia, passed an ordinance against
teenage trick-or-treaters, Heath Covey, director of public
communications for the city, said. The law came about after some
young people were caught throwing pumpkins in the street and
doing some pushing and shoving.
Under the Chesapeake Code of Ordinances, it is a Class 4
misdemeanor for anyone over the age of 12 to go trick or
treating on Halloween. A violator can be sentenced to jail for
up to 6 months if they are found guilty of being too old to
trick or treat. But the ordinance “has never been enforced,”
Covey said.
“The last thing we want our officers doing on Halloween is
handcuffing ghosts and goblins,” he said.
No one in Chesapeake or no one in one of the four neighboring
cities that have similar Halloween age restriction laws has ever
been arrested for being too old to trick or treat.
Like a lot of quaint old laws that are routinely ignored, the
Chesapeake Halloween ordinance has stayed on the books for 50
years. In 2018, however, someone on social media made a post
about it that went viral, getting the attention of Jimmy Kimmel,
the BBC, and even a Ukrainian TV crew.
The city got a kick out of the notoriety but the city council
did not bother to change the law. And Halloween in Chesapeake
has not been affected.
“If a 16-year-old wants to take his 10-year-old brother, and
they both go trick or treating, as long as they are not creating
mischief or some kind of disturbance, the biggest problem the
16-year-old is going to have is who gets the best candy,” Covey
said.
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